Published May 2012.
What’s that saying about the darkest hour being the one just before the dawn? In hindsight, last week turned out rather dark, when the mundane pressures of a modern Monday required that I be up and about long before first light. So it was still black as pitch outside as I sat on the porch steps, listening to night noises while waiting for the kettle to boil. Having spent seventeen years living in this creaky old country house, my wife and I are no strangers to things that go ‘bump’ in the night. Most of the bumps, burps, croaks, chirps, scuffles, scratches, hoots and howls of a Louisiana nighttime are familiar to us these days, and trying to identify the critters that make them is an entertaining pastime. So I was surprised, that Monday morning, to hear something I’ve never before heard in all the years of living out here—a Whippoorwill.

Have you ever heard a whippoorwill call? You’ll remember if you have. Floating out of the darkness, a whippoorwill’s high, ethereal cry seems the very distillation of loneliness and loss—up there with the calls of barred owls and coyote packs in the classic creepy night noises department. Listening to this one, which sounded as if it must have been sitting in the live oak in the backyard, it was easy to understand why the whippoorwill has a special place in American folklore. Native American stories hold that a whippoorwill’s song is a death omen; another early folk legend suggests that the bird is a harbinger of death that can sense a soul departing, and sings to capture it as it leaves. I didn’t know any of this at the time—I learned it all the following day after posting about hearing the bird on Facebook. And not being especially superstitious, I suppose I would have forgotten all about the whippoorwill’s visit soon enough had we not discovered our faithful old German shepherd dead beneath an azalea bush three days after hearing its mournful song.

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Published April 2012.
“It is the personality of the mistress that the home expresses. Men are forever guests in our homes, no matter how much happiness they may find there.”
—Elsie de Wolfe

I read somewhere that starting off a piece of writing with a quote is considered a cheap trick—a weak-minded way to sidestep thinking up a proper lead all by yourself. It’s certainly tempting: If you can’t come up with anything intelligent to write on your own, go and find something intelligent written by someone else and trot it back out. The general effect will be to make you look, if not as clever as the original proclaimer, at least as if you’re the kind of deep thinking intellectual who goes around with pithy quotes richocheting about inside his head, ready for deployment when the situation demands them. At a dinner party, regurgitating a couple of well-placed witticisms by Winston Churchill or Groucho Marx or Ghandi can leave you looking positively dazzling—creating the impression that you’ve mastered half of Western literature, rather than just how to use Google. Who am I to turn my nose up at that?

In any case, the above quote by Elsie de Wolfe, the American actress and socialite remembered as the inventor of interior design as a profession (thank you, Google, again), neatly sums up the balance of power at our house after three months spent getting ready for a massive garden party due to take place there in a few days’ time. As an exotic species imported to this part of the world nearly twenty years ago, I have absolutely no blood claim (the only kind that counts) to the home I inhabit, which has been in my wife’s family for upwards of a hundred years. So I have long since accepted my supporting role there as Chief Mower of Grass, Fixer of Broken Stuff, Vanquisher of Large Hairy Bugs, Taker-Out of Garbage and Carrier of Heavy Things. I am appreciated for my facility at these things, unchallenged for ownership of them, and I try to tackle them with equanimity and good humor. Although sometimes I fail. The garden party in question is something committed to many months ago—possibly under the influence of alcohol—that seemed a flawless idea at the time, not least because my wife’s forebears were ambitious gardeners who left us much to work with. I’m not sure whether my wife is familiar with Elsie de Wolfe. But I believe she would recognize Elsie’s sentiment, since as the party date has approached the pressure to whip house and garden into a shape that suitably expresses its mistress’s personality has weighed heavily upon her. And, alas, on the Chief Carrier of Heavy Things. Indeed, Things have gotten so Heavy during the couple of weekends prior to the party that, in the interest of preserving domestic harmony, it seemed a good idea to start accepting any and all offers of help.

Read more: Men Remain Guests

Published March 2012.
Fifteen years ago, had you told me there was anything, anything, worth getting out of bed for at 5 am on a Saturday morning, I would have assumed there was something wrong with you and hoped that you would go away. But that was before I was introduced to the extraordinary rewards of being in Breaux Bridge early enough to get a table at Café des Amis for the legendary Saturday morning Zydeco Breakfast. For those living two hours away, this requires a bit of an early start. But as anyone who has ever managed it will confirm, the experience of immersing oneself in that sublime combination of art, live music, great food, and exuberant dancing, more than makes up for the ephemeral hardship of getting out of bed. And the fact that you’ve already been awake for three hours somehow makes ordering a second Bloody Mary at eight in the morning seem almost reasonable. It’s Louisiana joie de vie at its finest—a completely authentic expression of the culture we have the good fortune to be surrounded by, not more than seventy miles from home. A couple of Saturdays ago I found myself there for the first time in ages—drinking, laughing, eating a boudin-stuffed omelette, dancing with strangers, and wondering why it had taken so long to come back. The answer is that there’s a new friend to show it all off to.   

New friends are good for lots of things. But one of their highest and best functions is to make you stop taking your surroundings for granted. Recently relocated to St. Francisville after twenty years in the wider world, my new friend Rod is a preternaturally gifted writer who has built a career, and an enormous audience, writing for outfits including the Dallas Morning News, the New York Post, and the American Conservative. Which is to say, my new friend Rod writes about far more serious stuff than I do. He is extraordinarily prolific—as anyone who has happened upon his blog [theamericanconservative.com/dreher] will have noted—eternally inquisitive, shockingly well informed, and apparently capable of writing with authority about any topic under the sun.

Rod has moved back to St. Francisville in the aftermath of his sister Ruthie’s death from cancer last year, drawn home to the small Southern town of his upbringing by the overwhelming display of community support and kindness shown to their family in a time of terrible loss. This being an era in which a prolific and popular journalist can engage with his audience as effectively from Ferdinand Street as he can from Philadelphia, Rod is blogging, writing, researching for a book, and having a wonderful time rediscovering the Louisiana he turned his back on twenty years ago, but is now primed to appreciate with different eyes. So when Rod emailed, crazed with enthusiasm after hearing a piece on NPR about a Lafayette smokehouse and specialty meats restaurant named Johnson’s Boucaniere, it was easy to leap on the bandwagon. By Thursday the plan had mushroomed into a fully fledged meat market arms race to identify and collect specimens of Acadiana’s finest boudin. Since Rod had never heard of Café des Amis, and since I’m supposed to be an expert in such things and was already sensing that my authority is going to be short-lived, I upped the ante and proposed an early start. At 6 am, armed with a cooler the size of a coffin, we set off across the river in the dark.

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Published February 2012
Sitting outside on a balmy, seventy-degree morning in the middle of January, with flip-flops on my feet and the slight sting of sunburn on my shoulders, I’m moved to observe that this is my kind of winter. Seventeen winters spent trying to heat a house with the thermal efficiency of a birdcage has left me dreading those stretches when cold air sweeps in from the midwest, collides with Gulf moisture, and spawns that unholy combination of humidity and frigidity that sends a chill through the wallets of old homeowners throughout the South. And while I’m sure we’ll pay for this winter’s dearth of hard freezes when the swarms of insects begin to hatch in spring, right now every day that dawns to sixty-degree temperatures, green grass and a flowering Japanese magnolia in the backyard is a pleasure to behold, so I for one am not about to complain.

In our household, I’m really not the cold-natured one. I’ve never minded low temperatures much, am happy to swim in cold water or take to my bike on days when the temperature is in the forties. Really, it’s my wife who really dislikes the cold—the one who visibly wilts when the mercury drops; who disappears beneath layers of wool and flannel and fake fur in about November and doesn’t emerge until March. Still, I guess anyone who grew up in a house where it was occasionally necessary to pour anti-freeze into the toilets could be forgiven for launching a pre-emptive strike at the first sign of frost. So it came as a real surprise on a chilly morning a week or so ago when, with cheeks aglow and eyes sparkling, she swept into the kitchen in a blast of frigid air and announced breathlessly that hands-down, her complete, absolute, favorite time of year was right now: the middle of winter.

This can be explained with a single word: Bulbs. Each year, the first sighting of a narcissus or clump of paperwhites awakens the fanatical horticulturalist and compulsive purchaser of gardening gloves in the woman with whom I share my life. For her their emergence within the brown-gray palette of a Louisiana midwinter is nothing short of magical. They are absolutely her favorite things—a fact that, as her husband and the father of her children, I accept with complete equanimity. So in the context of this issue I feel compelled to talk about them.

We all have things that crank our tractors. But where my wife is concerned the sighting of a stand of bulbs in a roadside ditch or unkempt backyard doesn’t so much crank the tractor as send it rampaging out of control, through the fence and into a pond. From the time the first tender shoots of Lent Lilies begin to appear in early January she becomes a woman possessed, cruising back roads and suburban side streets with a shovel and plastic bags in the trunk, ready to spring from the car and effect an opportunitistc harvest at a second’s notice. There is no fence too high, no underbrush too thick, no guard dog too belligerent, to keep her from her prize. Last winter while driving through a less-than-auspicious part of town during peak hour, she accidentally rear-ended the vehicle in front of her because she was ogling a huge stand of Byzantine Gladiolus sprouting in a yard behind a chain link fence. While standing on the side of the highway trading insurance details with the collidee she managed to ascertain that the house was unoccupied, and began plotting how to get her hands on some of the bulbs. It took her twelve months, but I have never seen her happier than the day she drove past and discovered contractors at work on the house. She screeched to a halt and slipped one of the guys a twenty. During the surgical strike that followed she managed to separate out enough glad bulbs from the main clump to keep her ecstatically covered in topsoil for weeks.

Read more: Once A Bulb-Hunter, Always A Bulb-Hunter

Published January 2011.
The first issue of a new year often seems a difficult one to write a coherent editor’s column for. It’s hard to know why. Perhaps because the limitations of linear time and the commercial printing process demand that most of the January issue be written not in January, but in early December—when everyone’s rushing about in pre-Christmas pandemonium and the constant diet of holiday music and eggnog make it hard to concentrate on anything the other side of New Year’s Eve. Although I’ve never had the benefit of formal journalism training, I am dimly aware that an editor’s column is supposed to touch on the subject matter of the issue in which it appears. And since this first issue of 2012 is loosely styled to address the theme of ‘New Beginnings,’ I  am very grateful to my brother and his fiancée for having just announced that they are getting married—thereby giving me the early Christmas gift of a “Reflections” topic, and my family a holiday to look forward to, all at the same time.

If I don’t write about my younger brother, Tom, much in this column (which seems to find its way back to the topic of family more often than not), it’s because he lives a hell of a long way away. Thanks to the Internet I can tell you that the distance between St. Francisville, Louisiana, and Brisbane, Australia, is about nine thousand miles. Although as is usually the case with the Internet, you have to be careful how you phrase the question. Initially when I typed my request into Google Maps it returned directions for driving to Brisbane, suggesting that the optimal way to go would involve road-tripping from Louisiana to Washington State, then kayaking to Hawaii (I’m not making this up; try it); thence to Japan’s south island, the Philippines, Indonesia, and down through the Banda Sea before making landfall on the north coast of Australia near Darwin. Google calculated this to be a distance of 15,629 miles (55 days’ driving time, but who’s counting?), and helpfully cautioned that the route would involve ‘tolls,’ and ‘a ferry.’ While taking this advice would likely produce interesting subject matter for future columns, I think we’ll fly.

Tom and Sarah will be getting married near Brisbane next June. We’re thrilled at, if impoverished by, the opportunity to make a family trip from Louisiana to be there—none more so than our daughter Mathilde, who has taken a not entirely selfless interest in whether flower girls get to play starring roles in Australian weddings. She may be disappointed. While I haven’t spent loads of time with Tom and Sarah in the past few years, my sense is that they mightn’t go for a full-blown, bells-and-whistles, flocks-of-flower-girls-type wedding. They’ve been together for ten years (Tom and I both having inherited the family’s procrastination gene), and have lots in common—both are the children of British immigrants who brought their young families out to Australia in the seventies. For the past eight years they’ve lived in Brisbane, where Tom has applied his masters degree in marine ecology to a career in aquaculture, while Sarah has thrived as an occupational therapist. A couple of years ago they bought a pretty little house near the beach which they share with their Australian shepherd, Archie; and several elderly chickens that they somehow rescued from a factory farm. On weekends they’ll put a kayak on the car and take a ferry to Stradbroke Island—a beautiful, lightly populated sand island close to the coast—and find a quiet spot on the beach to camp and fish. They read widely, cook creatively, travel when they get the chance, and generally try to tread lightly on the earth. They’re people I would like our kids to grow up knowing as well as it’s possible to know people who live on the other side of the planet. To be with them for their wedding will be a joy and a privilege, as it will be to call Sarah sister-in-law.

Pretty good way to start a new year. May yours be similarly filled with great leaps and memorable milestones.

Published December 2011.
There is a tendancy, in the era of extreme sports and ultimate fighters, to think of gardening as a gentle pastime for gentle people. But sitting here on a Monday morning with my back on fire, my hands crosshatched with cuts and burns and nursing a possible broken toe, I’d like to state that this has not been my experience living in the Louisiana countryside. Yes, it’s been another weekend of full-contact gardening out in the partially reclaimed wilderness that surrounds our house and I’ve got the scars to prove it.

This I ought to have seen coming. An air of intrigue has long surrounded the century-old, semi-tropical flowering tree Vitex agnus-castus, that has been clinging to life in the depths of a thicket of vines, thorns and underbrush in a neglected corner of our yard. Commonly known by the name ‘Chaste Tree’ and even more chastely in our family as the ‘California Tree,’ Vitex is a native—not of California—but of the Mediterranean. It has a number of things going for it. 1: When planted in full sun (i.e. not in the middle of a hedge of wax myrtle and Spanish daggers), vitex is supposed to produce delicate, fragrant sprays of lavender-colored blossoms irresistible to bees, hummingbirds, and wives. 2: Its seeds, flowers and leaves have been believed since ancient times to have anaphrodisiac properties—they are credited with “cooling the heat of lust” when consumed in the form of a tincture or elixir. This characteristic accounts for vitex’s common English names, that also include ‘Chasteberry Tree,’ or ‘Monk’s Pepper,’ the latter because the plant’s peppercorn-like seeds are said to have been used as a libido-leveling medicine by monks striving to preserve their chastity (We have Wikipedia to thank for all of this). What it doesn’t account for is what a hundred-year-old example of a flowering, libido-dousing, Mediterranean native would be doing growing in unappreciated obscurity at the bottom of our garden.

“Of course we don’t have to do it all,” insisted my a, knowing perfectly well that once her husband gets started on something he cannot bear to stop. “We’ll just make a little start…” I’ll admit to not having been terribly enthusiastic at the outset, so as I marshalled chainsaw, axe, bushhog, napalm and earthmoving equipment she distracted my attention from the stands of sharp Spanish daggers and decidedly un-chaste wax myrtle I would soon be wading through by reminding me what about this particular tree made it worth saving in the first place.

Read more: Saving the California Tree

Published November 2011.
As I write this my wife is somewhere on the wide, green prairies of the West Feliciana Sports Park, trying to be in two places at once. Now that our kids seem suddenly to have arrived at the Great Age of Participation, there is no weekday afternoon when one of them does not need to be somewhere: kicking, hitting or chasing a ball, playing a violin, lacing up a ballet shoe or reciting a cub scout motto. Nothing unusual about this of course. We’re only doing the same thing that has become a rite of passage for the parents of tens of millions of school-age children around the country—shuttling one’s kids to and between an exponentially growing network of extra-curricular activities. The relatively tranquil, quasi-nineteenth-century existence we lived on a farm at the end of a country road for the first six years of our children’s lives is apparently behind us, replaced by a state of perpetual motion in which we haul our confused offspring from said farm to one ‘enrichment’ activity after another. So much time do we spend doing this that I’m beginning to wonder whether it mightn’t simply be more efficient to abandon the house altogether in favor of a Winnebago. Like a band on tour, the kids could crash as soon as the lights went down on their last activity each evening, and sleep while their handlers drove through the night to get to the next gig.

And we’ve only got two! How parents noble, selfless, reckless or masochistic enough (depending on your point of view) to allow themselves to be outnumbered pull off the scheduling miracles involved in getting multiple children to multiple activities at multiple locations without fracturing the space/time continuum remains a mystery to me. Out at said Sports Park, I’ve listened in dismay as some wan, exhausted caregiver of multiple offspring recounts a litany of overlapping activities that requires a transportation plan akin to embarking on the Bataan Death March. In a Suburban. Sharing the responsibility helps—it’s why children are supposed to have two parents in the first place (three is a better ratio)—but since someone’s got to earn some money to pay for all this, one of said parents is invariably off at work, leaving the other to do the heavy lifting. So this afternoon, while I’m sipping coffee at my desk and writing, it’s my wife out there trying to be at the right place at the right time equipped with the right musical instruments, shin guards, tennis racquets, art supplies; and enough low-sodium, low-fat, high-protein snacks to keep it all on the boil.

All this is self-inflicted of course—the inevitable result of aspirational parents producing enthusiastic children then introducing them into a competitive environment. And really, when a little boy comes home from school and announces with big, wide eyes that everyone … everyone … in his class is going to be in cub scouts; what reasonable, loving parent is going to stand in the way? The kids want to do it and after all, the skills, social interaction, and shared experience that all this culture cramming brings will be wonderful for their young minds, bodies and souls; even if facilitating it all wreaks havoc upon your own.

Right? Maybe.

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Published October 2011.
I should have started this column hours ago, but have instead been procrastinating. In my case a period of unproductive piffling seems to be an essential part of the writing process—one that simply has to take place before any words will come. Why? I can’t understand what creative kickstarting could possibly be taking place in the brain of a writer while he is making origami chickens out of post-it notes. I’m not alone. Author Rudolph Erich Rascoe famously said “What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he’s staring out of the window.” The fact that Mr. Rascoe is better remembered for this quote than for anything he actually wrote, should be a warning to the rest of us procrastinators, but the facts speak for themselves.

Anyway, while not writing my column today I spent some time roaming around kayakmississippi.com, a website that presents the long, elliptical, highly entertaining stream-of-consciousness narratives of fellow writer and occasional contributor to this magazine, Keith Benoist. I have no idea whether he procrastinates. As the name suggests, Keith’s website is primarily concerned with kayaking, the Mississippi River, and the interesting things that happen when you put the two together. So most of his writings deal one or more of these topics at least a glancing blow. Beyond entertaining his audience though, Keith’s other great contribution to regional culture is an annual canoe/kayak race he organizes on the Mississippi named the Phatwater Kayak Challenge, that takes place the first weekend each October. As a keen participant in this odyssey I was mining the site for information about the race, when some older posts reminded me of Keith’s conviction that somewhere in the river’s murky depths lurks the Zeuglodon, a prehistoric leviathan of Loch Nessian proportions—a reptilian-looking toothed whale that was very much at home around these parts some thirty million years ago. That much is certain if the fossil record is any indication. Apparently in the early nineteenth century, Zeuglodon fossils were common enough that they were sometimes used as furniture. But today? A sixty-foot-long, tooth-bristling whale thing existing unseen in the heavily trafficked, straitjacketed Mississippi River of the twenty-first century? I’m not sure the scientific community is on Keith’s side. But as someone who has spent many an hour paddling a tiny toothpick of a kayak over the river’s impenetrable, swirling, silently heaving depths, I have to say that if forced to consider the possibility that prehistoric leviathans exist anywhere in this deepest corner of the deep South, the Mississippi River is where I’d be inclined to look. Part kayak race, part Zeuglodon search party, the tenth annual Phatwater Kayak Challenge will be joined this Saturday, October 8, and if any river monsters are patrolling the stretch between Port Gibson and Natchez, I’m sure this will be the year we see them.

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